Singing the Lesbian Blues in 1920s Harlem

When Gertrude “Ma” Rainey — known as “The Mother of Blues”— sang, “It’s true I wear a collar and a tie … Talk to the gals just like any old man,” in 1928′s “Prove It on Me,” she was flirting with scandal, challenging the listener to catch her in a lesbian affair. It might not seem like a big deal to us now, but back then, pursuing same-sex relations could get you thrown in jail.

The good news for women-loving chanteuses like Rainey, Bessie Smith and Gladys Bentley is that blues music in the 1920s was so far under the radar of mainstream America, female blues singers could get away with occasionally expressing their unconventional desires. That said, they all felt obligated to produce song after song about loving and losing men.

I don’t want to overplay the significance of the three songs that Ma Rainey wrote and recorded that had some references to lesbianism and homosexuality. That’s a handful out of hundreds and hundreds of blues songs that were recorded. The fact that there were any was remarkable, given the times. You certainly never saw it in any other part of American culture.

Ma Rainey

Philipson got intrigued when he was starting out as a filmmaker and preparing a course on the early 20th century African American art and literature explosion known as the Harlem Renaissance. “I kept running into these tidbits about this person being gay or that person being bisexual,” he says.

In 2008 he finished his first film, “Take the Gay Train,” which traces the threads of gay sensibility running through the Harlem Renaissance. Often, though, the desire to prove that black Americans, less than half a century out of slavery, could be as artistic and literate as their white counterparts went hand-in-hand with adopting the “proper Christian values” of middle-class Edwardians.

The blues community, however, had no such concerns about respectability, and that’s where Philipson found the most references to homosexuality. Which is why, three years after Gay Train he followed up with another documentary focusing exclusively on women blues singers.

As it turns out, the blues world was the perfect realm for people who were thought of as “sexual deviants,” as it thrived far outside the scope of the dominant white American culture in the early 20th century. In Jazz Age speakeasies, dive bars and private parties, blue singers had the freedom to explore alternative sexuality, and on rare occasion even expressed it in song. Says Philipson,

In lyrics, they talk about ‘bulldaggers,’ which is they called butch lesbians at that time, or ‘BD women,’ ‘BD’ being short for bulldaggers. There were references to being ‘in the life,’ which was understood to mean same-sex activity.

When you see two women walking hand in hand, just look ‘em over and try to understand: They’ll go to those parties—have the lights down low—only those parties where women can go.

A married woman who kept a female lover on the road with her, Smith is known to have exploded at a girlfriend, “I got twelve women on this show, and I can have one every night if I want it.”

With short cropped hair and a tuxedo, the lesser-known Gladys Bentley commandeered the crowd at Harlem’s Clam House in the 1920s, singing cabaret, tickling the piano keys and flirting shamelessly with the women in the audience. The only one of these women to openly exploit her lesbian identity, she was known for taking popular songs and giving them lewd lyrics, and she asked the audience to help her improvise naughty lines.

“Harlem’s 133rd Street was called ‘Jungle Alley’ because there were so many nightclubs on it,” Philipson says, explaining that Harlem had the only Roaring 20s blues clubs in the country that drew white “tourists” curious about “race music.”

The Clam House was famous because it had Bentley, reveling in her image as a ‘bulldagger.’ Because of her, it became a place where black lesbians and gay men would go to hang out. White sightseers from downtown would check out her show as well.

Ethel Waters with the Count Basie orchestra in the film “Stage Door Canteen”

Other blues singers delving into “the life” tried to keep it behind closed doors—and the lack of modern technology and online celebrity-gossip hounds made it possible to do so. In the ’20s, blues and jazz vocalist Ethel Waters, a lesbian, was involved with a dancer named Ethel Williams, as a couple known to friends as “The Two Ethels,” according to a 2007 biography of Waters by Stephen Bourne. They even lived together, a very disreputable act at the time, which Waters managed to keep out of all 20th century biographies about her.

Because she succeeded in the more refined European cabaret scene, blues singer and songwriter Alberta Hunter concealed and refused to speak about her lesbianism, according to Bonnie Zimmerman’s encyclopedia Lesbian Histories and Cultures. Hunter’s biographer Frank C. Taylor wrote that the vocalist, who lived with her long-term girlfriend, Lottie Tyler, would cringe every time a lesbian performer, like her friend Ethel Waters, would have a lover’s spat in public.

As Philipson explains,

What was occurring was occurring clandestinely or within urban settings that were more or less secret and difficult to penetrate. It was very much under the cover of night, because they could be prosecuted for same-sex activity. There were some open demonstrations of alternative sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance and in Greenwich Village in the late ’20s. Take for example, ‘the Pansy Craze,’ where Harlem drag balls were attended by sightseers and celebrities. There were also drag performers in cabarets, but that was very much the exception.

Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters all got their start singing and dancing on the turn-of-the-century vaudeville circuit. So it’s not surprising these women went on to revel in the saucy sexual innuendo of what became known as dirty or “hokum” blues. In Waters’ 1928 song “My Handy Man,” she sings,

The lowdown dirty blues was a far cry from upright, ambitious lifestyle promoted by the leadership class of African Americans that W.E.B. Du Bois referred to as “The Talented Tenth” in 1903, who were establishing black colleges and assimilating in the world of white Edwardians. As Philipson says,

The black bourgeoisie, the aspiring post-Victorian middle-class blacks, were very hostile to homosexuality. They were not the majority of the black community, but they were trying to set themselves up as the leaders. Post-Victorian morals were that you have no premarital sex, you get married, you raise a family, you stay together all of your life, you go to church, and you raise proper Christian children who take their place in society and reproduce.

Clearly, these lesbian-leaning blues singers were forging their own paths in a shifting cultural landscape. “No time to marry, no time to settle down,” Bessie Smith sang on 1926′s “Young Woman’s Blues.” “I’m a young woman, and I ain’t done runnin’ around.”

Comments

I didn’t know that she was leaning towards women! I had always had a weakness for those who were strong enough to stand and claim that they are different and are proud of it. Blues is all about that need to roar at the world and I bet she had a lot of it. Good stuff, will read more. Thanks!